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“We don’t have a car, so we can’t drive to lakes, beaches, and the like,” said Jesse Amaro, home health aide, outside Crotona Pool in the Bronx. It was one of the hottest days of last summer, and in the early afternoon the queue to get in was all the way down to the sidewalk.
He studied the row of sun-beaten so-called swimmers, their only escape was a spray of mist from a whirlwind swathed around a street sign. It would take an hour for him and his little girl to get in, and then at 3 pm, when the pools closed for an hour for cleaning and staff breaks, they would either have to finish swimming or cross the line a second time. to enter. Ms. Amaro, 46, decided to skip it. They headed home.
These struggles contrast with the glamorous ambitions of 1936, when the city opened its 11 largest pools. Extravagant bathing palaces for the masses were designed as symbols of civic pride and public investment. During the New Deal, the federal government helped build these large, elegant spaces for poor New Yorkers—who were then mostly white—who drowned their children trying to cool off in rivers.
But many New York pools, like others around the country, remained separate. Some have argued that powerful parks commissioner Robert Moses deliberately created white and Black pools, de facto creating them in the hearts and not the fringes of white and Black neighborhoods.
To deter unrest during the racial tensions of the late 1960s, the city began opening dozens of small pools in underserved, overheated Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Brutal policies enacted decades ago in response to pool violence continue to restrict what pool-goers can get onto pool decks, instilling Ms. Amaro’s “prisonyard mentality” into pools.
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